Arctic Sea Ice Figures

Under Construction

Animation of changes in average September sea ice extent from 1979 through 2016 – with noteworthy natural variability and a long-term decline. Data is freely available from the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) at https://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/.

Change in land ice mass since 2002 (Right: Greenland, Left: Antarctica). Data is measured by NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites. Additional information can be found at https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/land-ice/.

A look at Arctic sea ice concentration over the last 100 years (through 2013) using the latest NSIDC gridded 1850- reconstruction from Walsh et al. [2016]. The discontinuity between 1978-1979 is the transition to the passive microwave satellite era.

Trends in sea ice thickness/volume are another important indicator of Arctic climate change. While sea ice thickness observations are sparse, here we utilize the ocean and sea ice model, PIOMAS (Zhang and Rothrock, 2003), to visualize January sea ice thickness from 1979 to 2018. Sea ice less than 1.5 meters is masked out (black) to emphasize the loss of thicker, older ice. Updated through January 2018.

Trends in sea ice thickness are another important indicator of Arctic climate change. While sea ice thickness observations are sparse, here we utilize the ocean and sea ice model, PIOMAS (Zhang and Rothrock, 2003), to visualize mean sea ice thickness from 1979 to 2018. Updated through January 2018.